Posts Tagged ‘arduino’

3. While I am away from my minions, I wanna make sure that they are safe and happy.

Hence, I am preparing a super (duper) tiny project to alert me of movement around my minions (as I said, only I am allowed around my minions).

Parts

1. Motion detector (PIR sensor)

2. Wires (the sensor needs 3: ground, out, vcc)

3. Arduino board

4. I had Python on my mac-mac, but I also had to install pyserial, in order to communicate to the Arduino board, via the serial port. In my case, the Arduino board is reachable via /dev/cu.usbmodem1421, on other systems it’s probably different.

Picture

A bit of explanation

Basically, the “plan” is to log something to Serial port from Arduino, everytime I detect movement around my Minions. If that happens, I log “Movement!” to the Serial port. Then, from Python, I monitor the serial port, and if I read “Movement!”, then I send an email to myself, using my Gmail account, alerting me that the safety of the Minions has been compromised 🙂

Cristina is girlie and she likes PINK! Unfortunately, the LED part is the only one I couldn’t make work 😦 😦 hence no pink display for me.

The next best thing: we make pretty sounds!

Parts

1. Piezo (I have no proper speaker): well, I use it to make the (pretty) sounds

2. Light sensor + 1K Ohm resistor

I used this only in the beginning, as I wanted to make the piezo play sounds based on the light intensity. As I am not able to control the light intensity in my room in a good-enough way to make sounds, I decided to use the distance variation to play different tones (see 3).

3. Ultrasonic sensor: well, I use it to measure the distance from the sensor to my palm and based on this variation I scale the distance from CM to Hz and play the tones within a range of musical notes:

Well, I have not. That’s just how they are. The frequency of Mid C is 261.6 Hz, and the others as above. What I tried then to ensure is that I map the distances from the Ultrasonic reader to a range of frequencies which “make sense” (between 200 and 300 Hz). As I would just flip my hand around the sensor to no longer than 100 cm, I just decided to add 200 to the distance computed by the sensor, in order to create the pitch (I am sure there are much better ways to do this).

So it seems that I am back on “blogging”. Long time no see, my friends 🙂 and thanks for all the messages I got in the meantime.

Most probably I won’t be able to keep up blogging as in the past (not enough time to do all the geeky stuff), but I will not abandon it anymore.

The past few days I’ve found out about the passing of a friend, one of the geekiest people I know, an elderly gentleman, who has spent most of his life in the search for knowledge (he was speaking 11 foreign languages), curiosities and geeky stuff (a BSD passionate and founder of the foundation behind EuroBSDCon). I was very sad to get the news from Gavin and Henning this week, posted via the OpenBSD lists.

RIP Paul!

So, given the fact that for the past few weeks I can only sleep till 2AM every night, with occasional nights when I can fall asleep somewhere close to the morning, I have decided to spend this time on something useful, rather than with thinking and worrying about purpose of life and ponies and butterflies. First thing at hand: my new Arduino kit.

First time playing with this toy, I’ve went through the Startup Guide, and made the lights blink, the buzzer go off etc. The ones I am going to use later on though are the following:

Indeed, these are just playing around with the very basics, but at least now I get the logic of how this works, and the code itself looks a lot like C programming, with libraries you can include and work with (and have the Arduino board become unresponsive when the libraries folder has a different name than the .cpp file inside it).